The Java language supports three types of comments:
- /* text */ – The compiler ignores everything from /* to */.
- //text – The compiler ignores everything from // to the end of the line.
- /** documentation */ – This is a documentation comment and in general its called doc comment. The JDK javadoc tool uses doc comments when preparing automatically generated documentation.
What is Javadoc?
Javadoc is a tool that comes with JDK and it is used for generating Java code documentation in HTML format from Java source code, which requires documentation in a predefined format.
Following is a simple example where the lines inside /*….*/ are Java multi-line comments. Similarly, the line that precedes // is Java single-line comment.
Example:
/**
* The HelloWorld program implements an application that
* simply displays "Hello World!" to the standard output.
*
* @author Singh is king
* @version 1.0
* @since 2018-02-12
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
/* Prints Hello, World! on standard output.
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
Following example makes use of * for heading and has been used for creating paragraph break:
Example:
/**
* <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
* The HelloWorld program implements an application that
* simply displays "Hello World!" to the standard output.
* <p>
* Giving proper comments in your program makes it more
* user friendly and it is assumed as a high quality code.
*
*
* @author Singh is King
* @version 1.0
* @since 2018-03-12
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
/* Prints Hello, World! on standard output.
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}